FORESTER, C(ECIL) S(COTT)

born Aug. 27, 1899, Cairo, Egypt died April 2, 1966, Fullerton, Calif., U.S. British historical novelist and journalist, best known as the creator of the British naval officer Horatio Hornblower, whose rise from midshipman to admiral and peer during the Napoleonic Wars is told in a series of 12 novels, beginning with The Happy Return (1937; U.S. title Beat to Quarters). Abandoning medicine for writing, Forester achieved success with his first novel, Payment Deferred (1926); others included Brown on Resolution (1929), The Gun (1933), The General (1936), and The Ship (1943). Many of his novels were adapted to motion pictures; most notable among them is The African Queen (1935), which was made into an extraordinarily successful film in 1951 by writer James Agee and director John Huston. Forester also wrote biographies and history books, including The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck (1959; also entitled Sink the Bismarck!). Forester described the genesis and progress of the Hornblower series in the self-revealing Hornblower Companion (1964). He was correspondent for The Times (London) during the Spanish Civil War and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. During World War II, he worked as a propagandist in Great Britain and the United States. The last of the Hornblower books, Hornblower and the Crisis (1967), was published posthumously.